Please allow me to introduce myself - by John Sealander

It must be Fall. The Rolling Stones
are on tour again. I can't say that I'm surprised. The Stones have been
on tour most of my adult life. Always in late Summer or early Fall. I
get the tours mixed up now. I've been there in the stands for most of
them. Steel Wheels. Voodoo Lounge. Bridges to Babylon. The names clash
together in my head like Keith Richards chords on a cool Fall evening.
I'm not sure if I'll fight the traffic and crowds again. Maybe I've seen
enough. Maybe I've just got no reason to go this time. As far back as
I can remember, Rolling Stones tours have coincided with major departure
points in my own life. The Stones and I are about the same age, and not
surprisingly, we have discovered a lot of things at roughly the same time.
I remember the Voodoo Lounge tour well. It marked the Stones and my own
discovery of the Internet.

When I installed an early version of
Mosaic on my computer and discovered the World Wide Web, one of the first
thing I looked for was a Rolling Stones web site. I didn't find one, but
a few months later, with a Beta copy of Netscape 1.0 and my own fledgling
site on-line, I was not surprised to find that the Stones had their own
web site as well, promoting the Voodoo Lounge tour. I had to go. After
all, according to what I was reading on the net, the Dallas show was going
to be the big one: the long awaited, much publicized M-Bone multicast.
. .the first ever major rock concert carried live over the Internet. That's
great, I thought, but a Rolling Stones concert isn't something you experience
in front of a SPARC workstation watching 10 frame per second video in
somebody's media lab. You have to be there, squashed in a sea of humanity
staring at a gargantuan 200 ton, post modern stage that would make Andrew
Lloyd Weber weak with envy. I was wired, and so were The Rolling Stones.
That alone was reason enough to celebrate another right of passage together.

So, I get my Voodoo Lounge tickets,
which seem to cost three times as much as the previous concert I attended.
And as Keith's familiar chords begin to resonate with the almost identical
riffs already etched indelibly in my head, I am struck by the passage
of time. Things have changed. And yet, things have stayed remarkably the
same. The band is playing Not Fade Away to a sold-out Cotton Bowl
crowd. I remember my first encounter with The Rolling Stones when I heard
a Fairbanks, Alaska DJ play a brand new song called Not
Fade Away. I was a freshman in high school and Kennedy was still
alive. As the song climbed on the charts, I became convinced that this
was it. Music! This was what I wanted to do. When my family moved back
to Arkansas, I took the earnings from a summer job mowing lawns and bought
a white Vox Mark VI guitar exactly like the one Brian Jones played. When
he turned up face down in a swimming pool some years later, it briefly
crossed my mind that I was never good at picking role models.

A decade went by. I put my music dreams
on hold and went to architecture school instead. By the time I graduated,
my once treasured Vox guitar had been relegated to a dusty corner in my
parent's attic. I moved to the West Coast and attended my first Stones
concert. It was a warm late-Summer evening in Seattle. I remember walking
to the concert in Seattle Center, because it was just down the hill from
my apartment. There were no giant stages, just a ten foot plastic inflatable
thing that looked like a big condom. It was considered provocative then,
although in an era where a major touring show can easily fill 35 semi-trailers,
it seems hard to remember why now. The music was good in Seattle Center.
Life was simple. I didn't have a date, but I had a real job, and no longer
had to worry about saving up for months to go to one of these things.
When I walked home to my apartment well after midnight, it never occurred
to me that twenty years later it would make me nervous and uneasy to be
wandering around in the wee hours on the streets of a major city. At the
time, I didn't live in a fortress. I didn't have a car alarm. Hell, I
didn't even have a car. A city bus seemed a perfectly acceptable mode
of transportation.

It wasn't until the early 80's that I saw the Stones
again. I'd left Seattle behind and relocated to Dallas. But the move wasn't
the only thing that had changed. The old Vox teardrop guitar had been
given to the Salvation Army by my parents. Brian Jones had been forgotten
as well, replaced by Ron Wood. Everything about the Stones seemed very
corporate this time around. The band had a sponsor for their gargantuan
Steel Wheels tour and the novelty of the concept caused a bit of an outrage,
even though everybody would have tour sponsors just a few years later.
Steel Wheels was the zenith of an analog rock world that was going to
be shortly transformed by computers. Although I didn't realize it at the
time, I was at the zenith of what was to be a short and rocky corporate
life as well. I flew to Europe to do commercials. Stayed at the Beverly
Wilshire for weeks at a time editing in Los Angeles. With lots of ad agency
connections, I had easy access to the best seats in the house, courtesy
of Showco, the sound company for the tour. True to form, I squandered
this generous gift and jumped into the stadium infield pit to watch the
concert packed like a sardine with a solid carpet of very rowdy fans.
By the time the band launched into a spirited rendition of Jumping
Jack Flash, I had wormed my way to within fifteen feet of the stage.
I never realized I was witnessing the end of an era.

A few years later, promoters would
start making people go through metal detectors just to get inside the
stadium. As the 80's ended, I no longer walked home alone after midnight
from public events. And I no longer jumped into the infield crowd at rock
concerts. It wouldn't be long before I abandoned the inner city entirely.
A year or so after the Steel Wheels tour rolled through Dallas, I absent-mindedly
tossed some trash into the dumpster behind my townhouse and startled someone
inside who immediately jumped out of the dumpster and began screaming
at me. Evidently I'd hit the guy in the head with my garbage while he
was rooting around looking for bottles and cans. He said it was his
dumpster. Ironically, if we'd met just a few years later, after they started
dispensing Prozac like candy, this bi-polar dumpster dweller could have
had a whole new life as one of my ad agency co-workers. Six months after
this unnerving experience, a very nervous policemen emptied all six rounds
from his service revolver into a suspected car thief outside my bedroom
window and I reluctantly moved to a safer part of town.

Safety was evidently still on people's
minds on the rainy November evening the Voodoo Lounge tour rolled into
Dallas. This would be the third time I had seen the Stones in as many
decades. This time, I didn't have a job. . .I had my
own company. Walking in from the parking lot, I could hear a chorus
of car alarms, chirping like angry crickets as a very middle-aged crowd
locked their shiny new minivans, Suburbans and Lexus 400's with remote
clickers before walking the final 500 yards to the Cotton Bowl. There
were police on horseback and fifteen foot tall chainlink fences everywhere.
But there really wasn't that much to worry about. This crowd wasn't going
to hurt anybody. They were all preoccupied, talking to the baby-sitter
on their cell phones. Many even brought their kids. It was a family event.
All the teenagers looked distinctly embarrassed to be seen arriving at
a major rock concert in the back seat of their parent's minivan.

It was an eerie feeling indeed as the
rain got heavier, blending subtly with the computer controlled smoke machines,
lasers, pastel vari-lites and fifty-foot tall inflatable apparitions of
Elvis Presley and what appeared to be a giant Aunt Jemima. As the familiar
chords rang out and the crowd roared when Mick started to belt out "Please
allow me to introduce myself" there was this very visible moment where
the entire audience realized that no introductions were necessary. We
knew each other well. We had all grown up together. Our turn at the wheel
was just about over, but for the moment, we were still in charge.

And as I looked into the eyes of
the teenagers in the audience, watching disdainfully as their soaking
wet parents sang along gleefully "Who killed the Kennedys. . .it
was you and me" I knew there was a new generation of bitterness
brewing that would make my own cynicism seem almost trivial by comparison.
I knew the Stones would tour again, but later, as Voodoo Lounge became
another memory in a life of Stones concerts, I couldn't help wondering
how much longer time was going to stay on my side.